The Khaki Boys over the Top eBook

“Oh, can the gloomy stuff!” snapped Jimmy.
Afterward he admitted that his nerves were pretty
well strained. In fact that was the condition
of all of them. “You’re almost as
bad as Franz,” went on Jimmy.

“Well, I don’t want to be too hopeful,”
returned Roger. “But what are you going
to do, anyhow?”

“This,” answered his chum. He drew
his rifle up close beside him, took off his tin hat,
stuck it on the end of his bayonet, and cautiously
raised it well above the ground. It received no
bullets, as might have been expected.

“Come on, we can run for it!” cried Jimmy.

“What makes you think so?” asked his chum.
“Didn’t the lieutenant tell us to lie
on our faces?”

“Yes, but that was before the fighting ceased
in front of us. Fritz is having all he can attend
to on either wing of our advance, and, for the time
being we’re not being molested. If the Huns
were in any strength directly ahead of us, or to our
rear as we are now, that tin helmet would look like
a sieve by this time. It’s safe enough to
get up and run for it. And we’ve got to
hustle if we want to save Iggy.”

“All right, just as you say!” murmured
Roger, as he began to rise. It was not without
a natural feeling of timidity that he cautiously elevated
himself first to his knees and then to his feet.
As for Jimmy, he had impulsively stood upright.

“Come on!” he yelled above the din of
battle. “Come on!”

He started on a run over the shell-torn ground, with
what remained of the barbed wire entanglements here
and there.

“I’m coming!” answered Roger.

He expected any moment to receive a bullet, or to
be utterly blasted from the earth by some terrible
shell explosion. And Jimmy confessed, later,
that he felt the same fear. But these fears did
not hold back the Khaki Boys from continuing on to
the rescue of their comrade—­if he was in
a condition to be rescued.

“Where’s the place?” cried Roger
to his chum, when they had covered several yards in
a hasty rush toward the rear.

“Must be somewhere around here,” answered
Jimmy, looking about him. That part of No Man’s
Land where they then were, seemingly was deserted
by all save the dead. If there had been any injured
they had been taken well back behind the lines by
stretcher bearers.

For a time Roger and Jimmy feared they might be considered
deserters, coming toward the rear as they were doing,
and away from the fighting, and aside from mere scratches
neither of them showing any wounds. Though if
they had been hurt that would have been an excuse for
making a retreat.

But no one observed the two—­there was no
one to observe them, in fact. They were some
distance from their own trenches, and immediately
back of them—­toward the German lines—­there
had been a division in the fighting, so that the battle
waged on either wing, as it were.